As most of us know all too well, changing public opinion
in order to improve conditions for animals is almost always
an uphill battle. Influencing the perceptions and behaviors
of people with longstanding, entrenched and often indifferent
attitudes toward animals requires a deep understanding of
their motives and the barriers to change. That’s where
social marketing and research come in-- to help establish
goals, understand audiences, and craft effective messages.

Fenton Communications, one of the leaders in social marketing,
lists three “must-haves” for a successful campaign:

1) Clear, measurable goals
2) Extensive knowledge of whomever you are trying to reach
and what moves them
3) Compelling messages that connect with your target audience

For animal activists, so-called “marketing research”
helps provide a starting point for the successful development
of each of these must-haves.

1) Clear, Measurable Goals

Setting goals is an obvious first step in any campaign. There
is no way to otherwise know if you are succeeding or just
wasting precious time and money. As the animal liberation
movement becomes more sophisticated in its approaches, it
is essential to set clear objectives and understand how our
efforts succeed or fail to meet those objectives. Encouragingly,
in a recent survey of national animal groups, the Humane Research
Council (HRC) found that nearly half of the respondents measured
their outcomes and conducted follow-up evaluations for a majority
of projects and campaigns. If your organization hasn’t
already established clear goals and ways of measuring success
or failure, stop what you’re doing and go back to the
beginning.

Marketing research provides the tools necessary to developing
goals that are aggressive but attainable. It also helps to
measure our success against those goals.

2) Know Your Target Audience

Animal activists should start by picking a target audience
rather than simply using the same message with all members
of the general public. Before we activists can reach people
effectively, we have to whittle down the audience to groups
small enough that we can understand their unique motives for
and barriers to change. As author Joseph Conrad put it, we
need to find a way to “say something to somebody instead
of saying nothing to everybody.”

Once you’ve identified a reasonably sized, potentially
receptive target audience, you have to do everything you can
to understand those people. A pitfall for many activists is
to assume they know what will work for the target audience.
But that’s a dangerous assumption. Animal activists
live and breathe compassion toward animals, while for most
people it’s only a peripheral issue (at best), and the
same approaches will not work with both audiences. This is
where marketing research can really provide some help. Research
methods like interviews, focus groups, and surveys enable
animal advocates to put aside their personal biases and understand
how non-activists think and feel.

Ultimately, what matters most is not what animal advocates
think will work, but what is proven to work with the as-yet-unconverted
target audience. As Chris DeCardy of Environmental Media Services
says, “If we weren’t so hung up on winning for
‘our’ reasons, we’d be smarter about listening
to everyone else’s reasons and appealing to them.”

3) Develop Compelling Messages

Once animal activists have a good understanding of our target
audience, we can also more effectively develop and test messages
to see how well they resonate and lead to changes in opinion
or behavior. HRC and our clients have used marketing research
to refine advertising concepts, identify children’s
materials that were perceived as too controversial, evaluate
vegetarian literature to understand what content was most
influential for readers, and so on. The value of such information
is evident: It can inform the design and content of a publication,
as well as identify primary audiences or missed demographic
groups.

For instance, HRC recently conducted a project that involved
over a thousand surveys from people who had read a certain
piece of pro-vegan literature from a client. The respondents
skewed heavily female and young, confirming the client’s
beliefs about its current audience. Somewhat surprisingly,
respondents placed a high value on recipes and an article
about animal suffering, and a low value on an article about
the environment. Most importantly, more than half of the respondents
claim they are moving in the direction of vegetarianism or
veganism after having read the literature.

The bottom line is that animal activists need more information
about what works with our target audience, and marketing research
can help. Collectively, the top ten animal protection groups
in the U.S. have a combined annual budget of less than $150
million. Only a fraction of that total budget is spent on
marketing research. On the other hand, research (and promotion)
groups representing industries that abuse and slaughter animals
are comparatively well funded. In fact, the primary national
dairy producers’ association by itself has an annual
budget of more than $165 million.

In the face of such overwhelming opposition, it is paramount
that animal activists make every dollar work as hard as possible
for the animals. We can ill afford to waste money and person-hours
on ineffective campaigns, and marketing research can help
identify those campaigns before they’re even launched.
Strategic use of the research tools employed by the “big
guys” will move us much closer to our goal of reaching
people in ways that prompt them to consider compassion toward
animals.

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Che Green is Executive Director of the Humane Research
Council, a nonprofit organization that helps to maximize the
effectiveness of animal advocates by applying professional,
cost-efficient, and informative consumer and market research
methods. For more information, visit www.HumaneResearch.org.
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